Posts Tagged: family dinner

Dinner: The Playbook ON SALE TODAY!

We’ve been on vacation for the past week, a sort of calm-before-the-storm deal. From the moment we made our reservations a few months ago, I began thinking of it as our “Week Before” vacation: The week before school starts, the week before reality descends again, before work gets crazy again, before life morphs, as it seems to do every September,… Read more »

Dinner: The Playbook

Yes, that’s the cover of my new book, to be published soon, but before I go into more detail on it I want to know one thing: Are you with me? I need to know this because, while this book is going to be a lot of things — an adventure, a game-changer, a how-to manual for the family meal… Read more »

11 Things You Will Never Hear Jenny Say About Her Book

Two weeks ago, Jenny emailed me this iPhone photo of three boxes on our doorstep, with no further message. She didn’t need to tell me: these boxes contained 25 copies of her book, Dinner: A Love Story, the book she had spent an ungodly portion of the last year and a half mapping out, writing, rewriting, testing, retesting, and obsessing… Read more »

How to Plan Family Dinner

Last weekend I was in my friend Nina’s bright, airy kitchen, taking in the expansive view of the Hudson River out the back window, when she motioned me over to the kitchen table.  “Please sit down,” she said. In front of me, there was a small pile of cookbooks, some old Gourmet magazines, and a well-loved, yellowed recipe booklet that once… Read more »

If You Cook it, They Will Come

I’d like to interrupt the relentless roll-out of pizzas and stews for an important — maybe even obvious — message. A few nights ago I was reading yet another article regurgitating what we probably all know by now about family dinner. This just in: All kinds of great things will happen if you just sit down with your kids to… Read more »

Sunday Minestrone

Let me just start by saying this recipe is not a 30-Minute Meal. Nor is it a One Pot Wonder, a Five Ingredient Dinner, a Fix-it-and-Forget-it Dish or any of the other cute little titles dished up daily in magazines, cookbooks, and, um, blogs exactly like this one. This minestrone, which Pilar first introduced me to in 2004, is not… Read more »

Friday Round-up

…to have family dinner: When my kids are 16 and 15 (instead of 8 and 7) and we are dealing with friendship dramas, SATs, sexting episodes, and God only knows what else (Parents of teen-agers: please refrain from telling me what else) dinner will be so firmly established as my family’s 6:30 Magnetic North, that my kids’ hormone-raging, eye-rolling, parent-resenting… Read more »

My Real Food Movement

I think it’s so awesome when readers come up to me and say “I love your blog. You sound like you have the greatest life.” This conclusion is based on the fact that I regularly…eat porcupine meatballs? That’s a joke, but it’s also kind of serious. I need to back up for a second. My first job out of college… Read more »

Spaghetti with Clams

[UPDATED June 2023] This is so easy and so amazingly delicious. It takes 20 minutes. Twenty minutes!!! Make spaghetti according to package directions. In a large stock pot or Dutch Oven set over medium heat, saute 1 chopped shallot, 1 minced garlic clove, a few shakes of red pepper flakes and some freshly ground pepper in olive oil. (Not necessary to… Read more »

Choices

Last week on my Babble blog I asked readers what they thought of Michael Ruhlman’s HuffPo rant about parents being too “busy” to cook for their kids. Actually, that was only a subset of the rant. Most of Ruhlman’s anger was directed at food editors, cookbook authors, and Food Network stars (even Jamie!) for giving rise to the 30-minute-meal industrial complex…thereby… Read more »

“Pork in Milk”

My aunt Patty was the first great home cook I ever knew. She would get up at 5am, run a few miles, come home, make a big pot of coffee, and start making the gooiest, butteriest challah french toast you’ve ever seen. (At holiday time, she made it with egg nog. And she always added a dash of vanilla, a… Read more »

How to Have Family Dinner: Six Rules

(illustration by Laurie Sandell) Rule 1: If you have a kid under 3, don’t bother. Tending to a toddler at the table — his milk spilling, his food dropping, his inability to articulate how multidimensional your marinara is — it all takes its toll on the rest of the diners’s satisfaction, especially the cook’s. You won’t be able to concentrate… Read more »

When The Spouse is Away…

…the other spouse will throw all dinner rules out the window. At least, that’s the experience in my house. For whatever reason, when my husband is on the road, our sacred mealtime routine doesn’t seem so sacred anymore. While my kids get take-out or a Trader Joe’s pizza from the freezer, I will get all Prousty with a mammoth bowl… Read more »